Weapon restrictions and stamina

I have been playing this game for a few hours now, and honestly even if I love the game, there are some aspects of it that are totally retarded imo. Everything listed below is for the only purpose of making the game viable in teamplay.

With that, the game would become way better, simply because it would remove the broken part of it.

About weapons, the list would be Longsword Poleaxe Grandmace Greatsword Spear Bardiche Broadsword Daneaxe Flangedmace Saber Dagger.
Why ? SoW is just the strongest weapon in the game atm, because of the ridiculously strong stab and feints. Messer has terrible animations making backswing stronger and faster than pretty much everything else. Maul 1hit (or any kind of 1hit in melee) is silly. Warhammer is fine in teamplay but I chose to pick 1 type of each weapon per class, though it could be included imo. Same for dubaxe though it shouldn’t 1hit maa. Bearded is fnie but I still fine poleaxe more reliable.
For vanguard, zweilhander is way too strong, due to 2hit on every class. Claymore is basically a longer and faster sow. Brandistock 2hit knight with huge reach and terrible animations is the same. Haleberd relies on terrible animations (anyone fighting the fake backswings thingy should agree). I’ve talked with some people saying billhook was fine, though I would like a slightly longer recovery on the stab, or a longer windup. Fork is fine but a bit too weak for being reliable in team.
About 1 handers, the problem of animations comes when they are used with shield. Longsword 1h shield has probably one of the worst animations set of the game, you can even make your stab disapear behind tower shield in combo. The maces would all be fine without that fast still strong stab. Waraxe is worse than daneaxe so i didn’t inculded it (and i only saw 1 guy ever play it). HWS and MS are known cancers. Picking saber over shortsword is just to nerf archer’s melee ability, since it is not so difficult to take on a knight or a vanguard with it.

These things are just what i think that would be great for the game, and could make it live a bit longer. Hate them all you want but at least give arguments please.

Wow these new players with just a few hours and they immediately have deep insights into every weapon ! Surely this will get TBS to change their mind around no more balance changes, give up the new project and return to CMW.

-First hit flinch is far-fetched and requires several changes to every weapon in game to be viable, something like an ‘early release flinch’ would be better considering feints could be punished and also last second trade attempts wouldn’t be possible.
-I’d want to lower the stamina drain by a minimum of 50%, completely removing it is a bit over the top. I wouldn’t mind feint cost being lowered, but having someone octa-feint you and still have stamina left to parry if it fails is a bit too much, don’t you think?
-1 weapon would’ve been the correct way to go from the start, sadly they didn’t and it’s probably too late for them to implement it. HOWEVER it’d be nice as a serversided function to lock certain weapons, say you dislike the regular spear, then you can lock it from the server.
Sidenote: you should try waraxe, it’s not bad at all. Dane axe is the lowest damaging axe of all 3, it’s only good because of the length and the release timers

I think team flinch should be re-introduced, it would most likely help a lot in pubs to get noobs to stop mashing LMB. IF they do mash lmb, they will flinch their team mate instead of sending him flying 3 meters forward so he randomly hits you.

Stamina cost for feints would be to have a viable ftp, because you are currently getting punished for parrying in a 2v1 situation, which is totally retarded imo. Team flinch isnt bad, but i abuse the noflinch myself to stab through my team with invisible attack. I know waraxe is good, but daneaxe has enough reach to actually fight 2v1, and this is often usefull when playing spear, due to the no combo playing.

But you also wanted parries to not cost any stamina, then there’s no reason to lower feint cost for ftp or CFtP really. I agree with you that getting punished, stunned, for parrying is stupid, going for a hit trade is more rewarding for some reason.
If knockback didn’t get such a silly buff weapons like waraxe, flanged mace, warhammer, etc would be useful in 2v1 situations as well. I get your reasoning though, the same can be said about broad and morningstar.

Knockback if one of the thing i forgot about tbh, with halleberd you just need to parry once or twice agaisnt knight and spam kick lol. I am not sure about waraxe, because hatchet is 3htk on knight too if i am not mistaking. Also I didn’t talk about maa, imo changing dodge cost from 25 to 30 (giving them 3 dodges instead of 5) would be better if they can actually parry without caring too much about stamina. Good to see someone who can actually discuss over that topic anyway.

The bubble is a problem which needs to be addressed. In saying that, however, the more immediate issue is the sudden-stopping that happens when you collide with the aforementioned invisible bubble of doom (or any other part of the player model). A simple fix would be to add some sort of deceleration upon colliding with a player model, as opposed to suddenly stopping in your tracks. This would pretty radically improve weapons like the warhammer which get shut down by the sudden stops that happen constantly because you collided with the ridiculously oversized bubble on the back of the right leg.

Also, ass/neck/foot/leg/spine parries. Need I say more?

EDIT: If you’re new, Dusty, you should really play this game some more before you attempt to balance it!!!

@Dusty
Ever tried playing with warhammer against either halberd or brandi? It’s bloody impossible. The only riposte that might land is the stab, but chances are that it won’t, so then I’m left with doing an attack after parrying instead, which would either result in a trade or them being able to knock my character back with the attack.
I’m not a huge fan of the dodge myself, but it is convinient in team fights. Instead of increasing the stamina cost it’d be better to remove the ability to dodge out of recovery/flinch or active parry. Also increasing the cooldown from 0.3s->1s and removing the attack queue for it would be viable options.

@Jetstream
The bubble could be slightly reduced and moved forward slightly, causing the front bubble to be similar to the current one and the back bubble to be almost nonexistant. Having to use stabs to hit peoples back with 1h weapons other than swords is the bane of most weapons.
Most of thoose silly parries were removed in a mod by removing the blue parry tracer (not optimal, shortening it could be a good idea though), and moving/reducing the parry window to ‘pre-buff’ (Which would help prevent spine parries).

I got to rank 50 in 1003 hours I believe, wanted to make it in 1k, but nope.

I know well how annoying is knockback, mostly because i played halleberd myself quite a lot either in duel or teamplay. Knockback is still the fastest way to stam drain someone (better than maul imo), simply because you either parry the riposte and riposte yourself, or kick and drain even more stam (halleberd drains more stamina than double axe -.-).
Even if it is annoying, i think dodging during active parry is necessary for a man at arms, my only problem with maa is the stamina drain that can happen if the maa manages to dodge successfully all the time (dodge 25 stam / miss+cftp+parry ~38 stam). Also the backpedal speed of maa is prety much the same as the walking speed of knight, which makes gives the maa a huge amount of time to regen if the knight is out of stamina, but that is only true in duel, since backpedaling and letting his team die in teamplay is not really a good option.
I know that there is the source code of 2 mods that were made to improve parry (perfect parry and some server sided hit detection i think), but i will have to be in holiday to learn how Unreal code works to look into it properly.
Only good thing with the biggest bubble was that most feints were readable, facehug being impossible, but I couldn’t talk about it much more since i wasn’t playing the game much at that time.
I am still convinced that the game could be totally viable either in a casual and a competitive way by just changing a few things. Though the community would have to put some investment in it, and at least try what is being done instead of refusing any kind of change.